> in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware.
That's true with owning your hardware, but what about renting from Hetzner/OVH/etc? You get servers set up in minutes unless you have a very specific request (the only time I've had lead time with these providers is when I had a very custom request, a machine with 300+ TB of storage - yes that is not a typo). Everything else has been delivered pretty much instantly.
But even if let's say you have a very specific use-case such as needing a 300TB server that would typically require lead-time, well in that case the prices are so cheap that you can just keep it around all the time sitting mostly unused and still come out ahead compared to cloud pricing.
That's true with owning your hardware, but what about renting from Hetzner/OVH/etc? You get servers set up in minutes unless you have a very specific request (the only time I've had lead time with these providers is when I had a very custom request, a machine with 300+ TB of storage - yes that is not a typo). Everything else has been delivered pretty much instantly.
But even if let's say you have a very specific use-case such as needing a 300TB server that would typically require lead-time, well in that case the prices are so cheap that you can just keep it around all the time sitting mostly unused and still come out ahead compared to cloud pricing.